Quotes About Editing

It's an odd experience reading interviews with yourself. Interesting, though. Of course, you know that the journalist will have edited, rephrased or even rewritten what you actually said, but you can't help feeling that there's a special kind of truth in the way someone else paints you, however subjective they might be.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

I usually submit a novel at a certain number of words, and when I've finished working with my editor, the novel is longer than when I submitted it. I need my editor to help me open up the story.

A lot of people, myself included, are excited about blogging and stuff like that, citizen journalism, but I do remind people that no matter how excited we are, there's no substitute for professional writing, no substitute for professional editing, and no substitute for professional fact-checking.

A character takes shape in the act of writing. You start with something, and you add or subtract.

The best advice on writing I've ever received was from William Zinsser: 'Be grateful for every word you can cut.'

The best artists know what to leave out.

You have to be a ruthless editor of your own prose. Over the years, I've learned that the best way to incorporate research into the narrative is to turn it into action.

Keeping the pen out of your hand as much as possible is the best way to write a song, in my estimation. But the pen must come in to tighten it up.

Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.

But if one can lock the door, disconnect the telephone, and sit down to wrestle with the report for five or six hours without interruption, one has a good chance to come up with what I call a "zero draft"—the one before the first draft. From then on, one can indeed work in fairly small installments, can rewrite, correct, and edit section by section, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence.

Memory is at its best when it's selective, when we have edited out the dull, the disappointing, and the disagreeable until we are left with rose-colored perfection. This is often quite inaccurate but usually very comforting. It can also be fascinating to revisit. Was it really like that? Were we really like that?

I almost always write everything the way it comes out, except I tend much more to take things out rather than put things in. It's out of a desire to really show what's going on at all times, how things smell and look, as well as from the knowledge that I don't want to push things too quickly through to climax; if I do, it won't mean anything. Everything has to be earned, and it takes a lot of work to earn.

It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that's what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them unglued, and I like to see how how the characters in the novel cope with this problem. I have a scret love of chaos. There should be more of it.

When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.

It can take years. With the first draft, I just write everything. With the second draft, it becomes so depressing for me, because I realize that I was fooled into thinking I'd written the story. I hadn't—I had just typed for a long time. So then I have to carve out a story from the 25 or so pages. It's in there somewhere—but I have to find it. I'll then write a third, fourth, and fifth draft, and so on.

If you write a phrase and think, 'Wow, that's really poetic, that's really pretty, I really nailed it,' you get rid of it [because] you've overdone it.

You need a certain head on your shoulders to edit a novel, and it's not the head of a writer in the thick of it, nor the head of a professional editor who's read it in twelve different versions. It's the head of a smart stranger who picks it off a bookshelf and begins to read. You need to get the head of that smart stranger somehow. You need to forget you ever wrote that book.

Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.

A good approach is to allow one dream per novel. Then, in the final revision, go back and get rid of that, too.

Like a small business, a novel cannot afford to carry dead weight, even if it is a close family member. It is likewise unnecessary to introduce a mother and/or father into a narrative—usually through the medium of a long telephone call on the subject of 'How's things?'—to demonstrate that the protagonist does, like all mammals, have parents.

Writing is like everything else: the more you do it the better you get. Don't try to perfect as you go along, just get to the end of the damn thing. Accept imperfections. Get it finished and then you can go back. If you try to polish every sentence there's a chance you'll never get past the first chapter.

Music is where I have the most creative freedom, but I love producing. To me, that's kind of where all the action is. You get a chance to have your hands in every aspect of a film. From picking a director, sometimes picking a writer, to the actors, the wardrobe, set design, editing, music, and marketing.

real. The art of filmmaking is being able to eliminate all the bullshit and repetitiveness of real life for the sake of telling a smooth, clear story.